In today's computing system, a physical network or enclave is a system of devices that communicate via cabling, modems, routers, or other hardware. The devices are physically connected to a cable plant to form an enclave and are managed independently of any other enclave with a distinct separation of responsibilities and different rules in each. Each enclave is seen as a private area where information is not openly shared with other enclaves and is isolated from other enclaves. In order to share or reassign computing devices between enclaves, the device must be manually unplugged from a network switch of an enclave and then manually plugged into a network switch of a different enclave.
As shown in FIG. 1, some physical networks may include, for example, more than one enclave or form part of an extended network which incorporates one or more enclaves, whose network switches are linked to each other through a guard or firewall. The guard is in place to control the protocol rules and to filter certain traffic between the systems. For example, in an office system, the human resources department and the accounting department share the same extended network which contains general computing functions, but each department has their own enclave that is isolated from other enclaves. Therefore, the accounting department does not have access to the human resource enclave which contains personal information regarding the employees. Additionally, the processors in the human resources department are not available for the accounting departments use and are not able to be reassigned to the accounting department without physically unplugging and moving the processors.
The problem is that without physical manipulation, the devices cannot be allocated to other enclaves. For example, in the event that an enclave needs additional processing capabilities, it cannot “borrow” another processor temporarily or permanently without physical manipulation. Also, the information on the processor may need to be sanitized, by a user, so that private or secret information from one department is not available to another department. The solution is a computing architecture that interacts through software to interface with the enclaves in order to dynamically allocate subsystem resources. By doing this, “borrowing” of the processor could be accomplished electronically, without user knowledge or interface, and appears seamless. Then, once the processor is no longer needed, it is sanitized by computing architecture and returned to the processor pool for the next user.